Calif. charity ends full adoptions

Five months after Catholic Charities in Boston decided to pull out of the adoption business to avoid placing children with gay couples, its affiliated agency in San Francisco announced yesterday it was also ending its work as a full adoption agency because of the controversy.

``We are not continuing to do direct placements," said Brian Cahill, executive director of Catholic Charities of San Francisco, in a telephone interview.

Cahill emphasized that his agency would still help prospective adoptive parents, including gays and lesbians, with information and referral help through an alliance with another organization. Effective immediately, however, Catholic Charities of San Francisco will no longer handle ``individual home studies, specific family/child matching, adoptive placements, or finalizations," he said.

The agency's decision is the result of the same controversy that caused Boston's Catholic Charities to close down its 103-year-old adoption agency in June. Despite Vatican teaching that calls gay adoptions ``gravely immoral," Catholic Charities agencies in Boston and San Francisco openly acknowledged last fall handling a limited number of gay adoptions, mostly involving hard-to-place foster children. Agency officials cited a commitment to help vulnerable children, as well as the need to conform to the state's antidiscrimination statutes.

Since these disclosures, top church officials have pressured these agencies to adapt their practices to conform with Catholic teachings. Boston's Catholic Charities responded in early March by announcing it would shut down its adoption business because it could not reconcile its religious principles with state law. The Boston agency said it would continue some birth parent counseling and adoption follow-up assessments, though its limited program does nothing that would assist gays in adopting children.

In contrast, San Francisco's Catholic Charities will assign three staff members to work with California Kids Connection, a nonprofit statewide organization that compiles an Internet database of children available for adoption and assists with adoption referrals. The staff will help all prospective parents, including gays and lesbians, Cahill said. If that work ultimately leads to a match between a gay parent and a foster child, that is fine, he said.

``God loves them all," he said.

Cahill said his understanding of Vatican teachings is that a Catholic agency cannot be ``directly involved in the placement" of a child in a gay household .

When asked if the new plan still puts Catholic Charities in a position of assisting with gay adoptions, San Francisco Archbishop George H. Niederauer said he thought it was a form of potential ``remote" cooperation that does not conflict with Catholic moral teaching. He said he has consulted his predecessor, Cardinal William Levada , the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, on this plan.

Thom Lynch, executive director of the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center, said he would have liked to see Catholic Charities maintain its own adoption program. However, he said, the compromise enables Catholic Charities staff to continue to assist with adoptions, and may hopefully lead to ``far more children being adopted into gay families and other families."

Patricia Wen can be reached at wen@globe.com.